Posts by Adam T

Page:

Re: I'm depressed now

I'm frankly terrified nevermind depressed.

There was a point, many years ago when I was in 6th form, where I had a decision to make: get into writing (like my dad) or get into that "other" thing that my dad didn't understand, and didn't approve of - computer graphics.

I took the latter, and while it's been a great ride, recent years it's become less and less pleasurable. The hard work isn't the job, it's the tools, and each time the platform that the tools run on gets worse, it feels like another nail in my own coffin, or at least my enthusiasm.

Sometimes I wish I'd taken the path more trodden.

"I’m still puzzling why there are 16 action shortcuts, but not one serves as a one-click “Do Not Disturb” or “Silent Mode” function, let alone old school Profiles. I suppose PCs don’t really need a Silent Mode, so WM10 doesn't get one."

Actually, I quite often disable my network connection on my PC when I want some real head-down time. I'd like an Airplane mode on my desktop OS.

Re: Animation

There are so many disciplines, and more are being added all the time as we (and pioneering clever people) discover new things to do and ways to do them. The things that used to be time consuming are made easier for sure, but this is an industry obsessed with doing more for the same price (just like the chip industry), and where you just needed artistry 20+ years ago to be among the best, today you need a degree in mathematics. Well you don't, but it helps a bunch depending on your chosen field.

There will always be work for those who invest themselves, but it won't always pay well. But apparently there won't be enough food to feed the whole world sometime in the future too...that's progress for you.

Re: 7/10 at best.

@Bernard M. Orwell

You pretty much covered it.

The texture work on the characters is a nice plus, too many games are still painting details into the albedo channel (which you should never do with PBR), giving characters a horrible muddy look (see Assassins Creed).

By the by, I'm running with two Titan Blacks and can only get away with medium settings at 1440p (textures, draw distance set to max), and tbh it doesn't look all that different to Ultra. Testament to the quality of the base art in general.

Personally I find the controls fucking awful, the movement dreadful (regardless of key/mouse or joypad - I spent 5 minutes just trying to turn on a torch sconce because they insist on making movement tied to animation rather than, you know, what you want to do), and the locked camera distance (and FoV) from Geralt is awful, and the fact that a 6 foot fall can kill you is ridiculous.

Also the voice and character acting is disappointing. But then I've been playing The Secret World the past few weeks.

But I agree that the visuals (and the music!) are a treat. It's just a shame they're marred by the experience of actually *playing*.

But what happens next?

Read it, bored of Baxter.

I wouldn't say I'm particularly a Baxter fan, but I've read most of his books to date... Usually as fillers while waiting for something by someone else.

He goes on too much trying to explain the same things over and over, in case we missed it the first or second time around. And while his ideas have never been especially epic or original they're at least not off-putting. Unlike Ultima, which is conceptually indigestible and reads as if it was written by someone else; someone with no experience or instinct for science fiction.

2GB GPU to drive a 5k display?

Re: The GT CEO

Indeed.

He's claiming that the sale of stock was according to a plan laid out in March, but that doesn't make things any less dodgy.

Put yourself in his shoes. It's March and you're well aware by now that your glass isn't going to be in the iPhone 6, while analysts and media pundits are bending over backwards spreading rumours that it is. What do you do? Sell...preferably discreetly, over the next 6 months.

sad really

The only thing I get from this, is how sad it is that we're basically confirming that Google IS the Internet. Our reliance on it has gone beyond monopoly and entered the realms of God Given Rights (even though it's Man Made and an advertising company to boot).

"Web Search Engine chooses not to list some stuff", would have been utterly trivial a decade ago. Today we can't function without it. That's pretty scary.

I haven't "actively" noticed any Shockwave usage either, yet I often get a "Shockwave plug-in has crashed" report in Chrome (usually when I have way too many tabs open). So I guess it's in use still...but for what? Ads?

MarkForged

Nice try, but Autodesk lost my interest in lining their pockets a long time ago.

The MarkForged is interesting. I've been shopping for a printer with a decent long axis and that's just moved to the top of the "ooooh!" list. I'd be tempted to cancel my next L-series lens purchase and pre-order, if only they had samples to show. Honestly, selling a $5k 200 micron printer and they have zero samples to show - just a video with a guy trying to bend a little printed bar. Why is nothing ever simple?

@Joerg

@joerg

I won't argue that there aren't scam artists; you get them in every walk of life. But you can't tar everyone with the same brush - kickstarter and early access programmes make me a little uncomfortable, but in all honesty I'm glad they exist - I'm enjoying games that might not have been able to exist without them.

There's no shortage of idiots in the world, and they'll always outnumber you. Hang you head lopsided, drool, make moaning sounds and walk with a limp... Blend in to survive.

Re: Also available...

Sorry but the Star Citizen forums are full of people who seem to be completely gullible and happy to believe anything that they're told. Read a Chris Roberts interview... It's always Me and I ... Never, ever We. He gives zero credit to his team. He even named the company after himself.

Re: I'm Sorry

If you mean the Expansions Pass, that's no different to Season Passes sold for almost every major game now - and slightly better than kickstarter funding as you know by now that the game is actually real, and not just a pipe dream.

Even £30 on top to get into the Beta is reasonable if you consider it's probably going to be more fun than most finished games, and assuming you really love this sort of thing. 2 months sub worth of Eve Online.

If you want to choke over paying for things that don't exist, you should go have a laugh at Star Citizen, which is still peddling $15,000 'ship packs' (oh it says they're out of stock, but you can email them and they're happy to accommodate you). This for a game that so far has only has one hilariously wonky video shown at PAX as proof of goods.

Smoke and mirrors. That game is going to have a lot of shortcomings, with it's 300,000 poly ships. Try imagining you video card crumbling under the weight of a hundred players trying to squeeze into a small space with that lot. We invented normal mapping and cage baking for a good reason...

Well Carmack tweeted that he didn't write any code while under contract to Zenimin, which is easy to believe. He'll have told minions what to write instead. Bet they didn't see that coming when they drew up his contract.

Utter f*cking idiots. Re. iOS 6.1.6

So you can only download 6.1.6 on devices that can't run iOS7 (i.e. 3GS).

Which is moronic for devs, as we can't download it from the dev portal nor via iTunes nor via device (you can only download iOS 7 via Settings).

We have to keep a range of devices with each OS installed so we can reproduce bugs reported by users, and you'd be amazed how many iPhone 4 and iPad 2 users are still on iOS 6 (even 5). Telling people to upgrade is all well and good, but it's a total cop-out of just letting people use what they want to (and I understand, because I loath iOS 7).

Re: Meh

I've had LoveFilm for years now, and get 4 disks at once. Also have Netflix - big bonus, you can watch U.S. netflix on your UK account (just drop in a chrome extension).

I don't order disks anymore simply because I don't have time to watch them - I may get through two or three a month, whereas streamed stuff I'll watch from wherever, sometimes in the background while I'm working.

When Netflix first came out over here I pooh-pooh'd it because of the thin catalogue. Since then they've grown enormously... I finally signed up when Orange Is The New Black came up, and loved the service for about a year. It's easy to get through what you want to watch quite quickly though... there's not a lot on there for me now.

So as a Prime member, I'm up for the Instant LoveFilm. Costs a bit less, and I'll pretty much save double by ditching Lovefilm By Post. Just enough, in fact, to keep Netflix on the go.

Post is good - you can't beat a proper BluRay. But life is changing, spurred on by the times.

Re: Why even consult?

$17 billion won't last two minutes in the hands of politicians and lawmakers. It's certainly unlikely to benefit "people", and it's unlikely to change patent abuse... at best this entire scenario will force companies to simply modify their tactics.

As much as it would be fun to see a company that lies pay, the 5 year deal is probably better for everyone: the industry and consumers alike.

Re: Word is.....

Actually, the opposite can be dangerous too.

I have to work with a guy who is obsessed with learning everything about Word, and this means I'm constantly being handed Word docs with the most fucking awful abuse of layouts and styles imaginable. It's physically impossible to edit anything without destroying everything.

When I think of myself using Word, I'm not too fussed because I don't touch things I don't want to understand. But when I think of other people giving me Word docs they think are 'fancy', that I have to do something with, I want to curl up and die.

Re: A De-strossing Article!

@Gray

Thanks for the link (why was this not in the main article?). Quite a good read, and his argument is a lot more tangible when seen in the full context of his rant.

It's easy to sympathise with him, particularly when I think of the software I use day to day, which of course is also forced upon me, and I in turn must force it upon young minds who come to work for us - thus the cycle is guaranteed.

Standards are supposed to be a Good Thing. But sloppily constructed standards that lock you in, are Evil. Sadly, you can't run a monopoly with good intentions.

Re: Word is.....

"An excremental pile of unimaginable bloat with 100 times more "features" than anyone is ever going to use."

Unfortunately you can say the same for any mass-market productivity software out there, from Photoshop to 3D Studio Max.

They have to try to be all things to all people, in the hope that they hit that one unique selling point to each individual need.

The irony of course, is that they're so cluttered half the USPs go unnoticed because they're buried under a menu option that is only visible if you have the correct docking panel visible, which is only active if you're in the correct editing mode, where editing modes are to be found under Window->Advanced->Views->Modes.

Re: A De-strossing Article!

I'm regularly annoyed by Word's evolution of features - ribbon UI; where'd they put that button I used to use a lot?; why is it such a PITA to do this thing I want to do?; and so on.

But he's talking about file formats. What has that got to do with being a novelist? How many novelists open their Word files in an ascii editor so they can alter...what...XML? And, while not a fan of Word, I do know I can export a multitude of file formats if I ever become dataformatphobic.

Re: No MMS?

Re: Total amount of

"But your issue was due to other software you chose to install - nothing to do with the base OS...."

When the parts of the base OS at the time the software was written (DirectX, .NET, etc) require re-patching with yet more windows updates to allow it to run, then yes it has plenty to do with the base OS.

Windows is more than it's install didk: it's a whole trove of legacy libraries and frameworks. When you install a Windows OS, you're not installing the "whole" package.

You can say the same for most OS's, but OS X isn't even remotely in the same ballpark as Windows.

Re: Total amount of

Speaking as one who 2 weeks ago installed a clean Windows 8, I spent a whole day installing updates going back years - not for Windows 8, but for all the software and SDKs I had to install to do my job. Framework and security updates dating back to what must be XP days.

To be expected perhaps, but I didn't have nearly half as much of that nonsense in OS X with a clean install.

Also, Win 8 does a wonderful job of hiding the Desktop Windows 8 Update from the common user - the Metro interface options only let you either: Update Automatically, or Don't Update.... No 'let me know' option. Stupid.

Re: run out of cats?

Re: If my car leaned out it's fuel mixture to give me 60mpg ....

The car analogy doesn't work here (and when will people realise it never does) because in order for it to apply, your car would have to perform better on specific roads. I don't live anywhere near White Sands.

Samsung's cheat is to use a Plist file that's inaccessible to other applications. The argument 'optimised' falls apart when it's an optimisation available only to them.

Now, if they made it so we could hit turbo mode in our apps then it would be a different story, but then we'd probably have more stories about batteries catching fire.

Which makes me wonder, what would happen if you let one of these tests run and run...

Re: I can see many uses when the price drops

"It would also be lovely to have some sort of scanner, so when a little fitting breaks, you can fabricate another."

They're getting cheaper, and better. Makerbot's is just out, and there are other smaller ones (all the way down to $99 if you follow the kickstarters and don't mind naff quality -- measure to your needs).

Re: Well I would like one ...

Shapeways are really expensive for anything other than odd one- or two-off jobs.

Surprisingly (or not) nobody puts a $/cm3 on their product pages - supermarket style. However, Makerbot did a test not long ago with a 1kg spool, and they got 382 chess pieces from it. At £52 that's actually pretty good.

As for PLA & ABS supplies... this is where it all falls down. There's PLA and then there's crap PLA. I wonder which Dixons would stock.

I think home 3D printing market is too small at the moment...not just number of users, but the technology is still in the discovery phase. It's not about the price, rather the quality of the results. Shapeways may be expensive, but they have serious gear beyond what we can do with a £1-2k printer atm.